Instead of Summer Olympics, we’re judging CERB spending
Olympic athletes are not doing any running, jumping, throwing, splashing, bouncing, batting or whacking in Tokyo this summer. It’s a shame, as an Olympic August is usually our span of greatest indolence.
But the other half of the Olympic Games, judging, continues — perhaps at its greatest pitch ever. Four years ago, making ill-informed and crushing remarks about sporty people was practically a sport in itself.
“Without across-the-board Michael Phelps paddle hands, the American swimmers are in trouble this year.”
“If she can’t do the Biles beam dismount, you know, the double back salto tucked with two full twists, should she even be here?” “Face it, that horse can’t dance.” This summer, there are other sports to judge. Take face-masking, now enjoyed internationally. We are all a judging panel of one.
I watch a Roncesvalles butcher at work. “That mask looks like a cut sock. He keeps pulling it up and down and swiping his nose while he wraps raw chicken breasts, probably the ones I ordered. Did he just blow his nose with his face mask? Zero points. (sounds of screaming)”
And there’s CERBing, the homegrown sport of spending one’s Canada Emergency Response Benefit. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s NDP-backed Liberal government invented the game, which would never have existed under an Andrew Scheer Conservative government, which also would never have existed because there is a benevolent god.
Canadians judge harshly in this category. After months of hot, sleepless financial anxiety, we find newspaper personal finance case studies to be as delicious as peach Popsicles. We don’t read about people who have more money than us; their lucre is filthy and we will have no truck with them.
But people getting the same CERB we do? We are the creepy Russian Olympic skating judges.
A recent Toronto Star snapshot of a Toronto millennial restaurant server allegedly misspending her CERB had local judges divided. She paid her rent, fine. Therapy? Pass. Botox and facials? Shameful! Who does this woman think she is? Women are told to be beautiful but not with OUR CASH. Uber Eats? Nope.
But judges, she shares a basement apartment with two other roommates. She Uber Eats because she has no room to cook. She’s not saving money for a house, she just wants a little happiness in the short term.
No. And then we judge her even more harshly because she made millennials look bad, i.e., dishonest; self-indulgent; the town mouse as opposed to the humble country mouse from “Aesop’s Fables.” Now boomers are judging her. We find her to be the Chair Girl of CERBing.
I disagree. She’s 28. She doesn’t represent her generation, just herself. The youngest millennials aren’t supposed to be sensible, they’re supposed to be young and fresh, not dreary like boomers.
Yet so many millennials have dreary boomer ambitions. Why do they want to haul mortgages around for 25 years? Millennials are good-looking. Why don’t they concentrate on having bangingly great sex? That’s how I spent my twenties. And so on …
Judgy Canadians are missing the reasoning behind CERB. Ottawa didn’t invent it just to keep people sheltered and fed during the pandemic. It was designed to be spent. When the big American banks were bailed out in the 2008 crash, they notoriously held onto the money rather than lending it and having it circulate in a mending economy.
But Canadians who got CERB are spending every cent of it. They make their own personal choices. After rent or mortgage payments, they buy food, sewing machines, children’s splash pools, TTC passes, flour, yeast, face masks, disinfectant, air conditioners, walking shoes, loungewear, webcams, desktop ring lights, hair clippers, furnace HEPA filters, air purifiers, books, and bicycles.
And some of you bought boxes of boxed wine, cannabis-infused Turkish Delight, a Dufflet chocolate raspberry truffle cake and a Dufflet toasted almond meringue cake because why not, an oak sapling, a rabbit in a hat, a Drake General Store sheepskin throw, and a copy of William Dalrymple’s “The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.”
By 2022, we may be sleeping in the splash pools, and chewing and sucking on that sheepskin throw for sustenance. I begrudge no one their CERB spending, no one.